Artist of the Month

StAnza Presents...

Jenni Fagan

www.jennifagan.com

You’ll likely have already encountered Jenni Fagan’s written work, and that’s not surprising; she has written for The Independent, Marie Claire, and The New York Times, been listed for the Desmond Elliott, Encore, James Tait Black and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, BBC International Short Story Prize, and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2013, her first novel The Panopticon saw her placed among Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2016, her second novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, met with similar acclaim; her work has been translated into eight languages and both novels featured on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review. She has been Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, Lewisham Hospital’s Neonatal Unit and Norfolk Blind Association, and has collaborated with a women's prison and various youth organisations. In 2018, she was a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow at Grez-sur-Loing, supported by The Scottish Book Trust and, after completing a PhD at Edinburgh, she is currently Lecturer in Poetry at Strathclyde University.

So how do these images come to grace these pages?

In 2017, Jenni curated an exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway for the Koestler Trust, showcasing artwork by prisoners, young offenders, and those in secure psychiatric care in Scotland. In fact, Jenni has her own ‘vast body of photography and other artworks’ that she intends to collate and exhibit at some point. She also recently completed a Gavin Wallace Writing Fellowship at Summerhall, Edinburgh. During the residency she wrote a poetry collection, The Bone Library, but also created installations of the poems in gold lettering around the building and spent two months engraving poetry onto animal bones.

Jenni tells us:

I chose to work with bone during my Gavin Wallace Fellowship at Summerhall. The building used to be a huge veterinary training school— ‘the Dick Vet’ —so I wanted to find a way to fuse the origins of Summerhall with its modern incarnation as a home for artists of all kinds. During a staff meeting I was able to find out there were still some bones in the attic. I was told they had been left there because they were 'inferior bones,' so then I definitely wanted to work with them. I spent days up there going through old boxes and taking bones down to my studio. I had written poems that I was placing around the building as a form of kintsugi— the Japanese practise of filling the cracks in an item with gold —I was doing a form of that in Summerhall, seeking out spaces that needed to shine with poems, customised and put on the wall in gold. For the bones, I had to go through various processes; it is important to soak the bones to try and both clean them, and rinse off some of the chemical residue. I used a dremyl, scalpels, rulers, a clamp, small gouge tools and began to engrave the words onto each bone. The smell and potential toxicity when you are engraving bone means that ventilation and wearing a full mask each time is really important. I also wore a boiler suit which I kept in a bag at the end of each day. To make the words really pop I was painting the bones black then filling the engravings with gold. That meant leaking gold pens and dot-by-dot dripping the gold into each crevice. I can't wait to see them go back up in Summerhall, in their own display case. I am planning to go on to do some bone engraving classes— for intricate skull work, in particular. There are not any close to home, though, so I will need to wait until travelling seems a little bit easier.

So far, none of the bones are available for sale, but they will all be displayed together in a custombuilt case at Summerhall, Edinburgh.

Jenni’s written works, including The Bone Library, are available from all good bookshops.

Herbology News is grateful to both Jenni and Summerhall for permission to share these images. All photography: Jenni Fagan